...and I don't mean we're all baby boomers, I mean that baby boomers are the same people with the same motivations that I see around me every day. The immediate gratification and status and symbol seeking culture.

Baby boomers just happened to be the generation where it started rolling downhill faster. The current generation in their late 30's and early 40's (as one example) is simply pushing that faster and faster as the gears of our economy and society work more and more loose.

Want someone to blame? There's someone you can - it's YOU.

I thought they were a 'freemium' model; ergo, they don't need to make money off their free customers...

Out of honest curiosity, does CloudFlare have a reputation for this type of thing or are you exercising your paranoia about potentialities (which in matters like this is a GOOD thing.)

Many companies, including my own, obtain patents for defensive purposes. I have zero interest in attacking someone, but you will find it virtually impossible to obtain seed (much less VC or strategic) funding without a plan for providing even rudimentary protections for your IP - most especially if you're building something for an existing market (where doubtlessly there are existing patents.)

That doesn't absolutely guarantee you wont be sued by some other asshole who uses patents to attack, but it keeps them from trying to make a quick buck off of you, and it makes it significantly less likely.

Isn't this what a DMCA takedown request is for?

...whatever person posted it to Twitter?

I care. I'd like a Samsung Gear S3 Frontier that's waterproof - or similar. I'd like to get to the point where I don't carry a phone around to make calls, I just wear my watch. I'd like to get to the point where my watch is my BYOD for basic usage at work/elsewhere with wireless display and wireless keyboard - no dock. Et cetera...

Oxford is not a leftist institution, it's more conservative than Cambridge and Cambridge isn't some hippie hotbed of progressive thinking either...

As much fun as it is to believe that, and while that may be the case sometimes, the more likely scenario is that people - even smart people - are susceptible to subscribing recursively to their own belief system because *it feels good*.

I suspect that there are intelligent people who believe in faith healing despite God's spectacular inability to heal amputees... Doesn't make them stupid, but instead makes them wishful and clearly wanting the world to be a certain way.

This. Exactly. They don't teach Computer Science, they teach programming and some of the soft areas around programming. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that - but it's not Computer Science as defined at the collegiate/university level.

Actual computer science would likely bore the bejeesus out of high school students and yield little benefit except to those already determined to pursue a CS oriented path after graduation.